Dear M. Rocks, Re: seeing what to commit to for the next two years First a question: Do you primarily want it to animate or do you mostly want to do still images? I've been using Poser since P2 and I'm up to P4 Pro at this point. I find Lightwave much easier to animate in, although the learning curve is a little more steep than Poser. Despite my best efforts and lots of help from people here at Renderosity I have never successfully gotten the Poser plug in to work with Lightwave. The result, Poser is still part of my production pipeline. Do you need to get crowds of people on screen at once? Do you have a high end, lots of RAM lots of CPU power machine? Poser is a bit of a hassle when it comes do dealing with a lot of characters. I have work arounds but it would be nice to deal with several characters at the speed at which lightwave does. This is very much a subjective opinion that can not include several pkgs as I have never used any others, except for Wavefront and Softimage but they don't really count here. PS, I don't mean to rustle feathers of any die hard Poser fans in their own forum. I'm clearly still loyal to the pkg but the whole Poser 5 drama has made me take a wait and see attitude before I continue. I hope some of that rambling helped.